Peeking in the wavy glass of the windows, we saw a fireplace. Wood floors. High, coved ceilings. We strolled along to the back of the house, peeking in every window on the way.
It was my husband who summoned me over, peeking in the bathroom window.
“Come look at this,” he said, moving the cobwebs aside.
And there, I saw it. A big, white, cast-iron bathtub with claw feet.
“I want this house,” I said as I turned to him. “I want it bad.”
“Me, too,” he said, and we smiled.
We had found our home.
When we told our Realtor, she arranged for us to take a peek inside the house the next day, and with heels echoing off the wood floors, we toured each room and decided that it was the one.
“It sure has charm,” she said with a smile. “Sure is a lot of room here.”
We nodded.
“For when that new baby comes,” she added with a sly grin.
Erica’s Moving Adventure
I had lived in that house for ten years, a third of my life.
When the moving van pulled into my driveway on a Saturday morning, I suddenly realized that I was moving. Although we had bought our new house in September, spent four months restoring it, and had packed a hundred boxes, I was so busy with details I hadn’t actually considered that I was leaving. I was too wrapped up with the Disasters of the Week that struck the new house on a regular basis—the faucet of the kitchen sink flying off the wall the moment the water was turned on, the termites that were eating their way through the trees in the front yard, and the lead paint that was flaking off doorjambs and windows in chunks the size of potato chips.
I turned around and the rooms of the old house were empty, save for a mountain of dog hair in one corner, a crumpled piece of newspaper in another. The archaeological layers of my bedroom were unearthed, exposing forgotten Laurie eras. Remnants and pieces of the Lonely, Dramatic, and Drunk Phase were evident in the empty Tylenol PM and whiskey bottles, accented with a million ground-out cigarette butts; the I’ll Eat My Way to Happiness Phase revealed bags of Funyons, licorice, and Hershey’s chocolate chips, coupled with a vagrant’s fortune in empty Pepsi cans; and the Bad Boyfriend Phase dug up torn photographs, charred letters, and a lock or two of hair, used strictly for black magic purposes.
What was even more frightening than that was the refrigerator. With the recycling gods frowning on me, I threw away a household’s worth of Tupperware and unidentifiable containers, along with their mysterious contents. Although I had several tubs of Stroganoff, fajitas, and Chinese food that had most likely grown into cures for most of the world’s deadly diseases, I tossed them into the trash, where their destiny would now be in the hands of a city garbage collector.
My husband was busy shoveling all of the crap I had accumulated over the last decade into the U-Haul, which had apparently seen some scary things itself. One side of the van had been swiped clean of paint on its back half, leaving the company’s motto of “America’s Moving Adventure” into the crippled “erica’s Moving Adventure,” and a decapitated saguaro cactus. The sight had caused several neighbors to cross the street and investigate, asking plainly if I had been indicted for something and was therefore leaving the country. When we answered that we were only moving, their next response was to ask us if it would be okay to take all of the wrought-iron security bars off of my house and put it on their houses.
Now, the fridge was almost empty except for the containers that had grown teeth, the sedimentary layers had been cleaned up, and the trash taken out. I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and served as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I’d rather forget.
The day I had moved into the house, my head had swelled up the night before in an allergic reaction to black hair dye that was slowly poisoning my blood. My head was so big that my glasses wouldn’t fit around it, and it hurt to hold it up. After I returned to the new house from the hospital, where I received a massive shot of steroids in the rear end, I got a phone call from my then-boyfriend, who informed me that not only had he gotten into a car accident with the U-Haul, but he was in jail. Again. When an officer of the law came to make a report on the accident, an outstanding warrant had been discovered, and the then-boyfriend asked me if I could borrow $10,000 from my parents to pay his bond.
I was just completing this sentimental memory when my husband came into the house, his hands on his hips and a very stern look on his face.
“We can’t fit everything in the truck,” he said sharply. “You have to decide what stays. We can’t take everything. You are definitely going to have to change your lifestyle in the new house.”
I hate it when people tell me I have too much stuff.
“We’re not on the Oregon Trail, Captain Donner,” I snapped back. “It’s not like we’re going to have to start dumping china closets and beds on the side of the Squaw Peak Parkway because the oxen are too tired to pull the wagon. Fit what you can and we’ll come back for the rest.”
“THAT’S NOT THE POINT,” he said excitedly. “YOU HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF. HOW CAN ONE PERSON HAVE THIS MUCH STUFF? My great-grandparents pushed a handcart across America when they moved. They didn’t need this much stuff!”
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” I asked quickly.
“Yes, I am!” he answered back.
“Well, because you’ve done such a good job,” I said sweetly, “I’ve left some really good leftovers in the refrigerator for you.”
The Squatter
When a friend announced that she had decided to buy an older home in central Phoenix, I was happy for her.
“It’s a great house,” she added, “but it’s a little dated. The kitchen needs some polish, the floor in the dining room needs to be replaced, and I’m going to have the paneling in the living room removed. I’ll have to hire someone. But it’s just a little work, I don’t think it will take more than a couple of weeks.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied a little too quickly. “I have just one thing to say to you: Hire a therapist before you talk to anyone who even owns a hammer. I don’t want to scare you, but it would be easier to give birth to seven or eight babies at once. If you do that, you automatically get a five-bedroom house in Iowa for free from Oprah. Don’t call a contractor. Call a sperm bank.”
I almost wished I had. When my husband and I purchased the lonely brown house not far from my friend’s, it was our perfect little dream house. Admittedly, we knew it needed a new coat of paint and the bathroom required some updating, but it was just a little work. It shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of weeks. Really.
But when I started calling around, I found it wasn’t as easy as I thought. One contractor stood in the bathroom, his foot on the rim of the bathtub, snapping his suspenders with his thumbs. “Well, you see here,” he said, tapping on the pipes under the sink with a wrench, “what you’ve got is galvanized switch-backed backflow corrosion leading into the alterior ventricle. You’re lookin’ at a quadruple septic bypass, and I need two thousand dollars up front before I even take my first bite into this monster.”
“Wow,” I said, stunned. “All that for a new faucet?”
“At least,” he nodded, with a snap.
Another contractor informed me that he would need one hundred dollars in cash when he walked through the front door, before he decided if he would even take on the job.
“You want a retainer?” I snapped. “I’m not on trial! My toilet just won’t stop running!”
Finally, on the suggestion of some friends, I called Paul, a contractor who had done some plumbing and drywall work for them. On the phone, he was nice, cheery, and said he would meet me at the house after work.
I imagined him driving up in his truck, and out would step a dead ringer for Norm Abrams, the lovable, expert carpenter from This Old House. In years to come, I envisioned, Paul would stop by the homestead on Christmas Day armed with a fruit basket and r
oam around the house to make sure that all of his repairs were still working properly. We’d laugh about the good old days of restoring my house, recounting tender vignettes and drinking brandy in front of the blazing fireplace.
When his truck pulled up, I won’t lie that I was a little disappointed when the ninety-eight-pound, red-headed, longhaired man got out, wearing very tight nylon running shorts. Norm would never wear that. We should, he confirmed as he walked around the house, be able to move in in less than a month. It was just a little work. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, he said, really.
He arrived to start working with his partner in tow, a man named Len, who had occasional teeth. Sometimes he had teeth, and sometimes he didn’t. You just never knew until he showed up and saliva began shooting out of his mouth like antiaircraft fire.
Replacing the faucet in the bathroom did indeed result in repiping the entire house, a chore that Len fortunately finished before he was hauled off to the Tent City jail for being a deadbeat dad. Because of Len’s absence, Paul began spending more time at the house, sometimes working so hard that he just fell asleep there.
Despite the time he was putting in, however, little was getting done. In fact, weeks would go by when any noticeable work was finished. “You’ve got some problems in the attic,” Paul explained. “I have to work on that before I can replace the floor in the bathroom or patch up that broken gas hose in the kitchen. On the safe side, just keep a window open.”
Soon, Paul was in the house all of the time. Sometimes we would find him sleeping, eating pizza out of a box, or talking on his cell phone. Rarely, however, did we find him working. When I saw his truck parked in the backyard with a tarp thrown over it, I began to have questions.
“Oh, that’s nothing, just fell a little behind in my payments,” he said, laughing.
“Did you fall behind in your rent, too?” I asked. “Because I found your deodorant and a toothbrush in a Baggie in the toilet tank. You got mail here yesterday. By my calculations, you’ve been here for four months.”
That was when Paul started to cry. Standing in my laundry room, he leaned on the dryer he hadn’t hooked up yet and began to wail.
“Len is trying to kill me,” he said between sobs. “He’s put a hit out on me from Tent City because I couldn’t pay him and he couldn’t make his child support payments. The bank is trying to repossess my truck, I got evicted from my apartment, and a prosecutor is after me because I don’t have a contractor’s license!”
My blood turned cold. “You mean my house is a hideout?” I asked.
“If I finished the work,” he replied, his head now in his hands, “I didn’t have no place else to go!” Then he ran out of the laundry room, ripped the tarp off of his truck, and drove away into the night.
That was the last time I saw Paul, although I got a bill from him several weeks later for work he hadn’t even started on yet. Sometimes I wonder where he is now, and if it was the law or Len that caught up to him first.
I do know one thing, and that’s if Paul ever stops by to visit on Christmas and talk about the good old days in front of the fire, he’ll have to finish the bathroom floor before he gets one sip of brandy.
A Pound of Flesh
On April 14 of last year, I passed a “tax assistance center” on my way to get a Subway sandwich in a strip mall. Through the huge, clear panes of window glass, I saw the horrible vision of a world in limbo. Patrons sat in chairs against the walls, waiting for their turn at assault, their jowls drooping, their shoulders hunched as they clutched their flimsy W-4s as the clock ticked, ticked, ticked. The ones already being helped weren’t in any better condition; the life had been sucked out of their features, the vibrancy washed from their skin, and a thin film of perspiration covered their entire bodies. They sat quietly, watching dust float through the air with dead eyes. The tax “helpers” weren’t a much improved lot, looking as if they had been recruited from the bus terminal the night before, their qualifications confirmed when it was proven they could count to ten and had, combining both left and right hands, a minimum of five fingers. No one made a sound. Somewhere, quietly, I heard the floating notes from the sound track of Schindler’s List.
As I walked into Subway, I realized that my appetite was gone, although, honestly, it wasn’t helped much when I saw the acne-afflicted Subway teen scratch at his crotch and then manhandle a wheat roll. Gloves, I reminded myself, are no substitute for radiation, and as I left the scene, I passed by the tax assistance center once more, as paramedics tried to revive a man who had foolishly chosen 10 percent withholding, while a little girl in a red coat looked on.
Sometimes you have to learn the hard way.
My accountant, Lee, has seen me at my ugliest, even more so than my gynecologist. He’s done my taxes for the last decade, and did them for the first year my husband and I were married. As a newly responsible married person, I proudly presented my very organized stack of tax records to him, and he punched away on his calculator until he suddenly stopped. He explained slowly that now that I was married and filing jointly, it would be a wise idea for my husband and me to consult each other about how many allowances we each took, since combined, it appeared as if we were supporting a small Mormon settlement.
And the government wouldn’t believe that, he added.
I laughed about it, mentioned my two dogs and my cat and the fact that we “had a lot of hungry friends,” but Lee didn’t laugh back. Taxes were serious stuff. He went back to punching in numbers on the calculator and when he finished, he looked up again.
“Twenty-five hundred dollars is what I come up with,” he said.
“Wow,” I said in amazement. “That’s what being married does for you, huh? I had no idea! I would have gotten married before we had sex if I knew it would save us that much!”
“That’s not a return,” he said, looking at me. “That’s what you owe.”
I gasped. “But what about my deductions?” I cried.
“Well, surprisingly,” he said, “a book of stamps and a pack of paper didn’t carry you too far.”
“Wait!” I said, flipping through my wallet to find a receipt. “I bought pens, too!”
“From now on,” he advised me, “don’t count your dogs, the birds that peck at your grass, your cat, any imaginary friends, split personalities, alter egos, or insects that reside inside your house as dependents.”
I couldn’t help it. I cried. Just put my head in my hands and cried. No doubt Lee had seen this sort of tax behavior before from a new bride who was just too shell-shocked to be humiliated, but he looked away just the same.
It was that day when I found out how easy it is to get in big trouble with the IRS.
Going to jail for tax evasion is probably the stupidest thing in the world you could go to jail for, but people do it all the time. Imagine eating bologna sandwiches and going potty out in the wide open for years on end just because you were bad at math.
We all hate taxes, we all do, taxes are horrible, horrible things. I mean, have you ever been inside of an H&R Block office? It looks like the room where convicted inmates get to visit with their families in prison, decorated with those fold-up chairs that people scratch their names into, glaring lights, and empty walls. And I’m sure H&R Block knows this, they’re not trying to fool anybody by hanging a cherub poster on the wall and passing out wine and cheese. No, H&R Block is really Practice Prison; it’s like a near-death experience in which the dead person catches a glimpse of hell and then comes back to life as a nice person. That’s what H&R Block is, it’s a lesson, like “You think paying taxes is bad? Try watching your mother sob uncontrollably as she sits on a chair with ‘Alan is my bitch’ scraped into the seat. Now how much did you really give to this Burrito of Hope charity?” I wish there was a box you could check that says, “I will be paying with A) a check, B) a credit card, or C) a pound of flesh.” At least I could afford that to the extent I could remit some penalty fees, too.
This year, I got
prepared. I watched the Today show every day and listened when Matt Lauer told me I was eligible for several significant deductions. I wrote them down and saved enough receipts to fuel Lindbergh’s ticker-tape parade. Taxes, I had learned, were serious stuff. I had also been practicing with my husband, who, in the role of Lee, and me as myself, would act out the tragedy we named “Filing Your Taxes: A Melodrama,” just to be really ready when the day of reckoning came:
LAURIE (as myself): Here you go, Lee. (Handing Lee a stack of imaginary papers.)
LEE (my husband): (Looks through imaginary papers.) Oh, boy. This doesn’t look good. You’re in very big trouble, like “bologna sandwich and exposed potty” trouble.
LAURIE: How much do we owe?
LEE: (Shaking his head.) More than you’ll ever make in a lifetime. You could sell every egg in your ovaries and still not have enough.
LAURIE: What should we do? What are our options?
LEE: (Opens an imaginary cabinet, displaying a Colt .45, a noose, and a saber.) I’ll let you use the noose in the office, but anything else you can take outside. I’m not a janitor, you know. I’m a numbers man.
LAURIE: There must be another way! There must be!
LEE: (Quietly leans over and opens the palm of his hand, which displays a package of airline peanuts from his last vacation.) Are you allergic?
LAURIE: (Gasps.) God forgive me! (Bites on the knuckle of her forefinger, turns away, and closes her eyes. Lights fade.)
When I finally went to Lee’s office and sat in the chair across from him, my courage in a neat little ball in my lap, he ran down the list of my potential deductions.
“Have to be a practicing witch for that one,” he said as he sliced across the entry with his pen. “Have to have ridden a donkey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon within the last twelve months for this one. And must have eaten a hot dog at a ballpark and become violently ill for that one.”